KHARAGORA, a small village on the out skirts of the lesser Runn of Cutch, where salt has been manufactured since 1872. The Kharagora salt is in beautiful crystals, about the size of an almond, and so hard that the wastage caused by removal is insignificant. Ordinary sea salt is made by solar evaporation of the sea water all round the coasts of India, in pans laid out near the sea, all along the western side of the Bay of Bengal from the Sunderbans to the southernmost point of Ceylon, all through the islands of the Archipelago, and on the west side of India, north and south of Bombay. At Kharagora, the cost of production is only a few annas per maund of 82 lbs., but is a Government monopoly, and is sold at about 2 rupees 13 annas per maund.
The Runn of Cutch for miles and miles pre sents nothing to the eye but brown, barren waste. The is supposed at one time to have been an arm of the sea, and if wells are sunk in almost any part of it, there filters through the sand a salt brine. But there are three or four kinds of soil in the Runn, all lying in different layers, and it is only through one of them that brine per colates. This layer is found at a very great depth, and sometimes not at all. The salt manufacture there only lasts from the beginning of October to the end of April; and the Agria transform them selves into cultivators during the rains.
The salt works consist of between three and four hundred pans in ten rows, with a railway siding running between each two rows, and the whole is surrounded by a cordon of police stations. Each pan is 250 feet in length and GO in breadth, and has at one end a well ; and where the brine in the well is not of sufficient strength, a shallow reservoir is built by the side of the pan, and in it the water from the well is allowed to stand for two or three days, that it may settle and concen trate before it is poured into the pan. The pan is a work of art. There must bo no soft mud left in it. The Agria work up the mud with their feet into a stiff paste. and then beat it
down with heavy wooden mallets until it presents a smooth, tough surface ; and this process takes two or three months. The sides of the pans are lined with grass, so as to prevent loose earth from falling in, and the sides of the wells are protected by matted basket-work. The mode of raising water consists of two long levers resting 011 fulcrums fixed by the aide of the well, and the short arm of each is heavily weighted with hardened clay so as to bear it down and send the. other end towering up over the well. Earthen pots are suspended from the higher ends by ropes, and two men standing on planks above the well draw down the pots until they have gone down into the depths and been filled ; then, letting go.
the ropes, the beams fly upwards, the pots come up with a rapid swing to the top of the well, and are emptied into an earthen channel which com municates with the pans. When the pans have been filled with water and allowed to stand, the formation of minute crystals begins to take place, and from then until the crystals are fully formed, or, technically speaking, until the salt is ripe,' the pans must be raked from end to end, and fresh brine passed through them every day. If this is not done, all sorts of salt get mixed with the table salt, and the result is an unsaleable mixture. The raking is done by a man with a rough wooden rake made of twigs, too pliable to injure the bottom of the pan. During the earlier hours of the day, before the heat is great, each Agria trudges up and down his pan with this instrument behind him until no crystal has been left unshaken. By the end of March the salt is ripe, and is piled up by the side of the pans ; from these it is removed along the sidings in railway waggons to the great godowu which has been built for its storage during the wet months, and from thence it is distributed over the length and breadth of the land.